Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Affordability #Corruption #Incompetence
“As munitions streaked through the night sky, a plaintive cry like a whale song echoed in the darkness. U.S. troops grabbed their gear and headed for shelter as the warning sirens rang out, a leaked video shows. The military personnel, clad in a mix of combat fatigues and gym attire, piled into a bunker, huddling in the darkness. ‘Guys, off the walls if we can,’ a woman, likely a medic, advised, warning about the danger of traumatic brain injuries. The footage, reportedly from Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where three U.S. troops were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on July 17 and 18, offers a glimpse of the dangers faced by U.S. forces across the Middle East. The attacks are continued demonstrations of Iran’s ability to target U.S. bases across the Middle East and kill U.S. troops, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated. As this fiction has collapsed, U.S. Central Command has refused to discuss the number and scale of the strikes. ‘I have nothing for you on that,’ Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, told The Intercept. Iran has attacked at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. Several of these bases suffered ‘significant’ damage in the attacks, the source said. Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, according to the official. Numerous factors make the missiles difficult to defeat, the source said: They travel at hypersonic speeds, have complex navigational capabilities including methods to circumvent jamming, and some can be guided or steered. Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, the official said, referencing a Friday report by NBC News that revealed the tactic. The official told The Intercept that the U.S. allows missiles through its defenses only in cases where a strike is judged not to imperil U.S. lives. The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute.” (Nick Turse/The Intercept)
“The United States military has started to draw down its last remaining forces from Iraq stationed in the vicinity of Erbil’s airport in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, well-placed sources with close knowledge of the process confirmed to Al-Monitor. Patriot mobile air-to-surface air-defense systems that detect and shoot down incoming missiles, drones and other airborne enemy equipment have already been removed from the military compound, the sources said, without providing further details. The pullout started last week and is ongoing, with the bulk of the US forces and their heavy equipment out, the sources said. ‘All’ of the Patriot anti-missile batteries had been redeployed to an undisclosed destination, they said, adding that other defensive weapons systems remained in place as of the time of publication. Regional officials described the pullout as routine and in line with the US commitment to withdraw all its forces from Iraq by a Sept. 30 deadline that was agreed with Baghdad. However, coming amid sustained attacks by Iran and its Shiite proxy militias, and on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in particular, the withdrawal has left the Kurds feeling badly exposed.” (Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor)
“A new tech-sharing agreement allowing Ukrainians to make a British-designed radar jammer called Stone Cloak may soon help Ukraine accelerate drone strikes on Russian targets. Ukraine has been using British-built versions of the digital jammer—about the size of a computer tablet—on long-range strike drones already this year. But the agreement allows the country to mass-produce it themselves so it can be more rapidly scaled across their drone forces. The British government announced the existence of Stone Cloak for the first time on Saturday as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with the new prime minister at a naval base in Portsmouth. The occasion is the annual Sea Breeze joint exercise. Ukrainian, U.S. and British sailors paid ‘special attention’ to countering Russian air defenses during this year’s Sea Breeze according to Ukraine’s national news agency. ‘At this point, we don’t know the full details of Stone Cloak, but suffice it to say, the system will likely increase mission effectiveness against some of the Russian air defenses,’ Jeffrey Fischer, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, told Defense One via email. Ukraine uses a variety of electronic warfare systems as part of its drone operations. But the ones provided by partners like the U.K. are often backed by larger research budgets.” (Patrick Tucker/Defense One)
“The teenage boy’s hands and legs were shackled to the anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup as Sudanese warplanes attacked. He saw another child chained to the steering wheel. As their captors sought cover, the terrified children were ordered to stay and shoot down the jets over the capital, Khartoum. If they tried to flee, they’d be killed by their captors — if the planes didn’t get them first. The boy, now 17, told The Associated Press that those who ordered him strapped to the gun were Colombian mercenaries providing military aid to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces against the army in the war, now in its fourth year. Another child said he was forced to carry out artillery strikes and beaten for disobedience. The rare, firsthand accounts show the perils faced by tens of thousands of children believed to have been conscripted into the war by all sides. Six former child soldiers who were abducted and forced to fight with the Rapid Support Forces, known as the RSF, spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Two said they were trained by Colombians. Their accounts point to a wider deployment of Colombian mercenaries, who rights groups say were recruited by a state-linked firm in the United Arab Emirates to fight with the RSF. Human rights groups and Sudan’s military accuse the UAE of arming the RSF, and a U.N. panel said it had tracked weapons shipments to the RSF originating in the Gulf federation that includes Dubai. In a statement to the AP after this story was published, the UAE denied providing arms or military support to any warring party in Sudan. It also denied facilitating the movement of mercenaries or foreign fighters into Sudan or having links to mercenaries.” (Sam Mednick, Isabel Debre and Astrid Suarez/AP Live)
“During the recent youth uprising in India, some profanities and slurs that most Indians would hesitate to repeat made their way into a handful of popular slogans aimed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They shocked not only the older generations, but also some millennials, as well as seasoned members of civil society, the independent media and leaders of progressive rights movements, accustomed to a certain decorum and seriousness in protest language … The recent protests were initiated by the satirical Cockroach Janata Party. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) social media troll networks and the mainstream Indian media that toes the government’s line have previously vilified protesters and critics of the Modi government, but failed to portray this movement as the handiwork of foreign agents, because most protesters belonged to the mainstream Hindu middle class, the BJP’s core support base. Only after the protests ended with the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a move aimed to contain the damage to Modi’s carefully crafted image after a decade in power, did a new line of attack emerge: discrediting the movement retroactively over the profanities used against Modi in its slogans, especially by young women. Shashi Shekhar Vempati, chairperson of the country’s Central Board of Film Certification, popularly known as the censor board, raised the issue of ‘mouthing of gender-demeaning profanities’ in a post on X. So did Kanwal Sibal, a former diplomat, who took offence at what ‘young girls’ were saying against Modi — language, he said, ‘only the most uncouth males would employ.’ Kangana Ranaut, an actor and member of Parliament, targeted ‘young Hindu women’ for their use of curse words, dismissing them as ‘generation gutter.’” (Surbhi Gupta/NewLinesMag)
“I had anticipated that it would be epic. It is. There are some truly jaw-dropping set pieces. Film gold, as Nolan put it in his interview mentioned above. Scenes such as the Sirens, Hades, Scylla, Cyclops. CIRCE. I saw it in IMAX. In the shipwreck scene, the sound alone pulled me up by the hairs on the back of my neck. The storm was fully immersive. You could feel the power of the gods, if that’s what the sea and storm represent, as Odysseus’s men believe. If not, the power of nature (is that any different anyway?). A warning for our times? Unlike so many sword and sandal epics, this felt big. Bigger than the ground-breaking Gladiator. Much bigger … I had also thought that Nolan might play with time. (In his interview he mentions that the different narrative timelines attracted him to the Odyssey in the first place.) He does and in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. He makes a good decision to follow the poem’s initial focus on Telemachus and Ithaca, through which he’s also able to do some important scene-setting for an audience who aren’t going to be familiar with a lot of the material. But what impressed me most was his adaptation of Odysseus’s experiences. Out go the Phaiakians. Instead, Nolan concentrates the retelling of all those set-piece events on Odysseus’s stay with Kalypso. And he makes the Lotus eating an integral part of the recounting, as we see him trying to remember and recover his identity. Identity was the third theme that I highlighted in last week’s post as a consistent interest of Nolan’s. The focus on Odysseus’s re-membering was a neat turn, not least because identity and storytelling are so closely bound in the poem and recent critics, including the host of this blog, have written eloquently about Odysseus through the lens of cognitive studies and, especially, trauma. Odysseus comes across as someone traumatized by his experience of war. That’s a fair reading of the Odyssey and a smart adaptation for modern times.” (Sententinae Antique)
“Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update. Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls. ‘This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,’ O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying ‘the boss wants this money.’ In turn, Trump has called her the ‘princess of darkness’ because she is such a ‘killer’ with donors, according to people who have heard his comments. SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library. Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.” (Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer/WSJ)
“This is El-Sayed’s second statewide race. In both cases, he entered as the heavy underdog, a Bernie Sanders–aligned candidate seeking public office. This time, as he seeks to replace outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, El-Sayed has increased his viability from highly improbable to likely Democratic nominee for Senate. Most public polls and some private polls (including one of the last internal polls from the now-aborted campaign of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, according to a Democrat with knowledge of those surveys) show El-Sayed winning the primary. Most recently, a late-July poll has him up on U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens 46-36, with another 14 percent undecided. Part of this surge is thanks to El-Sayed’s own populist skills: He’s a gifted orator who has managed to attract the affection of progressive Democrats. Part of it has been Stevens’s struggles to raise money or get comfortable in the spotlight, and McMorrow’s difficulty carving out a lane. But whatever the reason, with less than a week until Election Day and over 800,000 Michiganders having already voted, establishment and normie Democrats are engaged in a collective mass panic and a frantic effort to keep El-Sayed from winning the nomination with whatever they have in their arsenal. El-Sayed’s top surrogates have argued his nomination would send a larger message to the rest of the party. ‘Everybody is watching this race!’ Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who traveled from Washington state to stump for El-Sayed, said during a rally on Saturday. El-Sayed’s political trajectory began in 2018 with an ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, after serving as a bright-eyed health director for Detroit. I profiled him for Politico’s magazine during that primary. We were both young—him 32, me 29—childless, and recent graduates of the same college. Longtime political strategist for Barack Obama and others David Axelrod, who has praised El-Sayed as a candidate, often argues that politicians learn more by losing.” (Daniel Strauss/American Prospect)
“Hours after Wisconsin’s most respected pollster gave her a 22-point lead in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Francesca Hong told a group of voters why she wanted to rein in AI. ‘We’re the only campaign that is supporting a moratorium on data centers,’ she told a special education teacher at a Black-owned small business hub. ‘The tax exemption for data centers is around $2 billion that the state is missing out on.’ Hong, a 37-year-old socialist legislator from Madison, is rolling toward the Aug. 11 primary as the clear favorite over a panicked establishment. Her rise started with her Jan. 8 announcement of a ‘Control-Alt-Delete’ plan for AI that started with pausing new data center construction. The issue emerged, she said, during conversations on the trail with rural voters who asked what they could do to stop the electricity-hungry facilities that have sprouted up nationwide to power the nation’s AI buildout. ‘I don’t know if I had a ‘eureka’ moment,’ Hong told Semafor. ‘I just knew that people were pissed.’ Grassroots opposition to data centers has exploded since last year, with the biggest political benefits accruing to fully opposed left-wing candidates like Hong — who’s aligned against labor unions and business groups that want to see construction, with limits. Democrats are eager to run against the Trump administration’s proposal to cede federal land to data centers, but just as with ‘Medicare for All,’ progressives have filled in the blanks with a marketable response faster than the center-left did. National Democrats, nervous about their left flank’s policies and electability, are now bracing for Hong to win her nomination, for Abdul El-Sayed to win the Senate nomination in Michigan, and for Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence to win a swing-seat House nomination in the middle of that state.” (David Weigel/Semafor)
“For more than a decade, Andrew Tate has publicly advocated for and bragged about personally choking, slapping, and violently dominating women into submission across dozens of podcasts, interviews and online broadcasts. Rumble, the video hosting service backed by investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and JD Vance, paid Tate at least $6 million a year to spread his brand of propagandized violence against women. During that same period, at least eight women have publicly alleged that Andrew or his brother Tristan Tate strangled them during sex, several saying they lost consciousness. They include Lauren Southern, Brianna Stern, three women pseudonymously quoted in the New Yorker, and four anonymous women in a UK civil case. The brothers deny the allegations, but given their long public history of bragging about doing exactly that to unnamed women, their denials ring hollow. The Tate brothers are Sons of Epstein. There is an ideological and criminal lineage between the Boomer global sex trafficker and these Millennial monsters: shared misogyny, assumption of impunity, underage victims and of course, the pimping business model. Only the style has been updated. Every video of the brothers oozes psychopathy. Their brand of caricatured manhood is derangement on steroids. To our shame, the American government has treated these stranglers like international heroes instead of global pariahs and a significant threat to women and girls worldwide. One of the Trump administration’s first acts was helping the brothers escape rape and trafficking charges in Romania by flying them to Miami. Ric Grenell, a ‘diplomat’ with the extra special title of Special Envoy for Special Missions of the United States, pressured Romanian officials to lay off the Tates, who had been released from prison but ordered to remain in the country. A month after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, they were out and delivered to Miami by private jet.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Flying over the southwestern Amazon, archaeologists have discovered hundreds of ancient, monumental designs carved in the earth that hint at complex societies in the rainforest a millennium before Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived. The research, published this week in the journal Nature, shows circles, squares and other geometric figures, some with connecting roads, beneath the forest canopy, with nearly 400 previously unknown earthworks in all. Many are formations that archaeologists call geoglyphs and date from between 600 B.C. to 850 A.D. All of them add to evidence contradicting the depiction of the Amazon as a largely untouched expanse before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century. To see under the dense canopy near the borders of Bolivia, Brazil and Peru, the researchers used a laser-scanning technology called lidar — an acronym for light detection and ranging — which archaeologists and other scholars around the world have used to map sites invisible to the naked eye. The geoglyphs, shaped by embankments, mounds and trenches, vary in size. Most span seven acres, including many with ditches 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The biggest figure sprawls across more than 120 acres. ‘This is an important and ambitious study, based on exceptionally extensive lidar coverage for this region, which reveals the remarkable scale of pre-Columbian landscape modification in southwestern Amazonia,’ said José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the research. Further excavation, he said, would be crucial in investigating the geoglyphs, which in many ways remain mysterious, including ‘how they were used and whether they were associated with residence, ceremonies or other activities.’ Drawing in part on oral accounts from the Apurinã nation, the Indigenous group that lives in the center of the earthwork area, the researchers said that the designs likely had several purposes. ‘We are quite sure that those are used for festivities, political occasions, ceremonies, dance, music and also competition like ball games,’ said Martti Pärssinen, the lead author and an emeritus professor at the University of Helsinki.” (Alan Yuhas/NYT)
“On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Matthew Hennessey arguing that Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, has enabled or signaled tolerance for anti-Semitism, despite his repeated condemnations of anti-Semitic hate. It was—unfortunately, predictably—laden with a casual Islamophobia that I, as a Middle Eastern American, have come to expect. Hennessey calls Mamdani a ‘zealot’ and describes him as ‘a rabble-rouser in a kaffiyeh.’ But what was most shocking was the appalling image that accompanied the essay: a photograph of a man holding an obviously doctored cut-out of Mamdani’s head with a green Hamas headband emblazoned with meaningless markings meant to imitate Arabic script. It’s difficult to imagine that the Journal would be comfortable publishing such overtly racist tropes about almost any other minority group. Anna Bahr, Mamdani’s director of communications, responded to the picture on X, writing that she spoke with Paul Gigot, the Journal’s editorial page editor, about ‘the incredibly Islamophobic image printed alongside this opinion piece. His take: ‘I don’t see it as racist.’’ Therein seems to lie the problem. (I reached out to both Gigot and a spokesperson for the Journal, but neither responded.)” (Susie Banikarim/CJR)
“Days after the US military started bombing Iran, Nick Fuentes looked into his camera and told his viewers, ‘Do not vote in the midterms, and if you do, vote Democrat.’ It’s hard to ever really know if the White Supremacist is being earnest, but he clearly wasn’t trolling. He told his audience of young right-wing men, ‘The Republicans have to lose,’ and ‘A cleansing fire is the only thing that will save us.’ It was an instruction nobody in the MAGA coalition had ever issued before. An act of this level of heresy in the pro-Trump MAGA media world usually brings rebuke and isolation. What was the consequence for his apostasy? His weekly Rumble views grew from about one million during the 2024 campaign to as high as eight million, per a New York Times analysis published Friday morning. The loudest anti-Trump stay-home message in right-wing media turned its messenger into the fastest-growing act in the business. What’s more revealing? Pro-Trump outlets are losing viewers. In droves. Which is much more concerning for Donald Trump and, by extension, the GOP, than the raft of terrible CNN and Quinnipiac polling numbers that the political media obsessed over this week. And fair enough, those are brutal. Writing for the NY Times, Stuart Thompson tracked audience data across YouTube, X, Rumble and podcasts for twelve of the biggest MAGA Media creators on the right. He describes a growing problem for Trump that no poll has clearly captured. After all, polling data measure if people agree with you; this data show if you are reaching them. Yes, Trump’s come back from ugly approval numbers before; but he’s never before faced a collapse of the pro-Trump media ecosystem. And it really looks like its collapsing.” (Colby Hall)
“My father, always preternaturally comfortable at social gatherings, struggled with anything resembling a real stage, and as he got into the car that morning, he announced that he felt like a lamb going to slaughter. Since childhood, he had contended with an intermittent stutter, which often presented as a sort of boarding school affect held over from his youth. But it became more vexing when he was nervous, and as we made our way down the winding streets of central Rome toward the larger thoroughfares leading to Cinecittà, I could hear it starting to surface. I dropped him off at the costume department and headed back to my office. His scene was first on the schedule, set to shoot right after lunch. In it, he was to play a television talk-show host interviewing Zissou and his crewmate, played by Seymour Cassel. The scene was short, consisting of only a brief exchange: my father, as the interviewer, was to ask a question; then Bill Murray was to shrug, and Cassel would give a one-line response. On my way up to my desk, I stopped in at the soundstage. At the far end of the vast space, a small set had been erected: a faux television stage, midcentury in style and outfitted in shades of orange and brown. In the middle, flanking a low, lacquered coffee table, were three tawny, padded swivel chairs, casually awaiting their occupants. Around lunchtime, I went to look for my father and found him sitting in a makeup chair in front of a bank of theater mirrors. His navy-blue blazer and scuffed Rockports had been traded for a roomy Italian suit, dove gray with white pinstripes, and sleek, honey-colored dress shoes. A white tissue had been fixed under his glasses to shield them from the buff makeup coating his face, and a stylist was coiffing his hair. It was hard to talk much amid these ministrations, but even in our brief exchange he imparted an air of deep dismay. Just as I was getting back to my desk, the phone rang. The voice was familiar: it was Bill Murray, and he had a question. He had known Anderson to cast people with no previous acting experience. He had worked with some of these people in the past. ‘Has your father ever acted before?’ he asked. His tone sounded somewhere between amused and alarmed. I explained, regretfully, that he had not. There was silence, followed by a long sigh.” (Molly Cooper/The Paris Review)